


Shitty B. Knight: Human Extraordinaire

by Itgoeson



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Best Friends, Fluff and Angst, Platonic Kissing, almost?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-14
Updated: 2016-10-14
Packaged: 2018-08-22 10:39:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8282900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Itgoeson/pseuds/Itgoeson
Summary: Shitty Knight is a remarkably well-adjusted human, despite the fact that he’s a goddamned mess.
(Shitty Knight and the emotional support he gives & gets.)





	

Shitty Knight is a remarkably well-adjusted human, despite the fact that he’s a goddamned mess.

He doesn’t wear clothes when he can avoid it, has an 80’s style pedo-stache, and shouldn’t be allowed within 500 feet of calm conversations, but he’s still the person most likely to not go batshit crazy.

“Shitty doesn’t need to express sadness in order to be a sympathetic and dynamic character,” Johnson muses one morning over breakfast.

The table freezes. “He’s okay, though, right?” Ransom finally asks, having long ago accepted that Johnson, while off the deep end and over the garden fence, is always right.

Their goalie shrugs. “It depends on what you mean by ‘alright,’ I guess, but he’s going to continue being a fan-favorite character and a generally happy guy.”

Shitty is well-adjusted, and the team tends to take that for granted, but they start thinking.

Once, he caught Ransom eating Cool-Whip from the can and crying over a biology textbook. When Shitty put a hand on his shoulder, Ransom just whimpered, “bodies are art, man, how can I ever even start to fix them?” and burst into tears. Shitty had sorted through his notes with him and handed over some weed.

He’s listened to Holster’s careful phrases, how he backs away from gendered language when talking about relationships. Shitty once hugged him on the bathroom floor for three hours while he cried about trying to ignore that he was very, very bi because that way he’d never have to come out to his family.

Lardo has thrown her notebooks and binders and several coffee cups across any room she’s in, sniffling without crying, furious and silent, so deathly quiet except for the thuds of failed tests  
and ruined projects. Shitty has left them where they fall and sat next to her in silence for what probably totals entire days if you put them together. He never mentions it.

The point being, constant mild complaining aside, Shitty is a well-adjusted dude who people can trust with their problems. No one, to the best of their knowledge, has seen him cry, or mope, or generally let negativity of any kind impair him at any length.

Well, mostly.

Jack has had panic attacks on days he skips workouts, and Shitty has cried into his shoulder while Jack drifts, limbs leaden and breathing slow as he comes off the panicked high of it all. They’ll nap together, Shitty swiping at his nose and telling Jack how much he loves him.

(Jack never manages to keep the lovestruck smile off his face, but that’s okay. Shitty deserves to know how much he means to Jack.)

They’ve run their hands over one another’s backs, slow and steady, matching their breathing. Jack has taken to his Best Friend Status with fervor, and koala’d himself to Shitty on days where Shitty’s had to be there for everyone else. They’ll lie in Jack’s bed, Jack’s leg slung over Shitty’s and his head on Shitty’s chest, listening to him talk about gendered relationships and societal expectations and law school until they’re both nodding off.

So Jack ducks his head and mutters that Shitty’s fine and goes to the library to check out a book, ignoring Johnson beaming at him.

It’s not until he’s curled up on Shitty’s bed, their homework spread out between them, taking turns quizzing each other on bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes (Jack’s) and Latin vocabulary (Shitty’s), that Jack mentions it.

“You don’t cry in front of the team.”

“Astute, you majestic seahorse you,” Shitty grunts. He shifts, and Jack sighs because he’s not Lardo – not every body is beautiful and should be captured at all times. He could live without seeing Shitty naked all the time. He wishes for an instant that he cared enough to at least throw a towel on Shitty’s junk, but goes back to his notes instead.

“Johnson just said some weird shit the other day,” Jack finally says.

“Johnson says weird shit, brah.”

Shitty shrugs and goes back to muttering about declensions. Jack tunes it out until the sun starts to set and their notes start to shiver in and out of focus. He nudges Shitty’s shoulder with his own and nods to the lights. “Hard to see. You take your meds yet?”

Shitty cuts himself off mid-ramble and looks at Jack. “Bad?” He gets up, flicks on the light, and goes to rummage for his Adderall. “I’ve probably been talking your ear off.”

“Nah,” Jack shrugs. “It’s. Soothing. And I learned a bit about second wave feminism when I took a break from studying.”

“Still, man.” Shitty pops the Addy with a drink of leftover orange juice and flops down over Jack’s lap. “You never tell me to shut up.”

“C’est vrai. You don’t need to, though.”

They sit in comfortable silence for a while, just breathing, until Jack pokes at Shitty’s hipbone. “Getting skinny, bro. C’mon, let’s go eat.”

Shitty complains about the gray area of appropriation when you’re a cis white dude because he doesn’t always know when he’s doing something wrong the entire way to the 24/7 taco place and Jack makes him pay. He says it’s to make him feel better.

“Jacques Laurent Zimmermann, you’ve got a hockey star and super model for parents.” He squints his eyes when Jack motions for him to pay.

“And I know your real name. It’s a rich name. Trust fund name.”

The girl at the register lets out an ugly laugh and immediately covers her mouth. Shitty beams and hands over his card, winking. “Too right you are.”

“What is it, then?” she asks, swiping it and yelling out their order.

“Byron,” Jack tells her, reading a text from Bitty. A grocery list, since he was already off campus with Shitty and Bitty didn’t bring a car to college. He ignores how warm it makes him feel, that Bitty feels comfortable enough to ask, and follows Shitty back to their table.

That night it’s Holster who brings it up.

They’re crowded in the living room, Holster swiping circles over Ransom’s back as Ransom checks over his notes. Jack’s in an armchair doing his readings for class, Bitty’s books scattered over the floor but Bitty himself only writing or reading a sentence or two before restlessly getting up to check on his pie, then the drinks, then fussing over the volume. There’s a ScyFy marathon on, and they’re all quietly ignoring it. Shitty’s with Lardo, studying for the LSAT again and listening to her complain about a project.

So Holster, once Ransom’s gotten out his highlighters and pens and started on revisions, looks around and grunts. “What’s Shitty’s first name, anyway?”

Ransom looks up. “Dunno, man, I’ve never heard it.”

Bitty’s head pops up from behind the couch - they don’t ask what he was doing - and he cocks his head. “You’ve known him longest, Jack.”

“Buchanan,” Jack says with confidence, right as Lardo and Shitty stroll in the door.

Lardo pauses. “Buchanan what?”

“We were trying to figure out Shitty’s name,” Holster says. “Brah, that’s, like, the roughest name, no wonder.”

Lardo frowns. “Jack told me it was Bennett last week.”

Jack grins and closes his book with a thud. “It’s ten, guys, don’t forget to get some sleep. See you in a while, Bits.” With that, he’s jogging up the stairs.

The rest of them stare at one another before whipping their heads around to look accusatorily at Shitty.

Shitty shrugs and spreads his hands. “A bro can’t have an ambiguous name? What’s in a name, anyway? A Brose by any other name is just as sweet.”

Lardo and Holster groan. Ransom snorts and goes back to his notes. Bitty thuds onto the floor, arms spread and staring at the ceiling in despair. “I don’t want to practice at 4 again,” he whispers into the silence.

It sets off another round of laughter, and Shitty flashes him a smile when the conversation moves on to how Jack might work harder than God, but Bitty’s a saint for putting up with it.

Sure enough, seven hours later, Jack is slamming Bitty against the wall, steady him after the check. Bitty breathes deep and exhales in rhythm.

“Too much for today?”

Bitty shakes his head. They’ve been at it for a while, but it’s getting better. He just needs to stop thinking about it quite so much. “Tell me somethin’,” he asks Jack. “Shitty’s name - is there a reason he doesn’t use it?”

Jack shifts uncomfortably. Uncomfortable is not a word Bitty associates with Jack when they’re in Faber, but he’s fidgeting, tapping his stick against the ice and frowning down at it. Finally, he looks up at Bitty. “Yeah.”

Bitty nods and stretches out his shoulders, pulling an arm behind his head. “If I tell you a scenario, will you give me a yes or no answer?”

“Uh,” Jack stalls, looking cagey. Bitty smiles and darts forward to knock shoulders with him. Jack’s too solid, spent too much time on the ice, for it to really move him anywhere, which Bitty is grateful for. Shitty would have fallen over and cracked his head of Bitty had tried it with him.

“Did aliens abduct him and only call him by his first name? Brings back the trauma of outer space?”

Jack laughs, loud and surprised. It echoes, bounces off the walls and all the things they avoid talking about, heaped between them. Bitty tries to not to show his cow eyes, head over heels for this boy, and skates a lap around the rink. “It’s really Buchanan, and he hates the president so much he won’t use it.”

“President Buchanan?” Jack asks, lost.

Bitty shakes his head and smiles. “Canadians,” he sighs, and goes on guessing ridiculous reasons for Shitty’s hatred of his name.

Jack relaxes. Can feel something in him unwind. Of course Bitty would understand secrets. They both seem to have their share of them.

Still, he wishes Shitty would tell him. Secrets make Jack antsy.

But Shitty used to be Brian, back when there’d been a Breanna. She’d died when they were sixteen, though. A drunk driver, Breanna with her liscence fresh in hand. Shitty had failed his test, and Breanna had been driving them home from a football game on homecoming weekend. A drunk driver ran a red light, like drunk drivers do. And Shitty wasn’t a half anymore, and his name wasn’t a cute “look at them” so much as a reminder that he wasn’t whole, either. So Shitty stopped going by Brian when he could help it, and went by Shitty to everyone he met when he’d come to college.

Jack looks at the tape on his stick and thinks about mourning. Thinks about the way he’d changed the way he taped it after his overdose and Kent and the Q. Thinks about how he’d gone by Coach Z to his team, and how that’s the closest he’s been to a nickname in years and thinks - names have power. Sometimes you have to bury them. Sometimes they die with people. It feels disrespectful to exhume a name and leave the person behind. He thinks he understands where Shitty’s coming from, but respects him too much to tell him so.

They’re both grieving, even if it’s been too long to talk about it.

So he tells Bitty to come up with something better than “he joined the Illuminati” and checks him into the boards again. 

That night he curls up on Shitty’s bed. 

“Shits?”

“Yeah bro?” Shitty says from where he’s draped over Jack, head on his shoulder and ribcage slowly crushing Jack’s lungs.

Jack’s quiet for a moment, thinking. Shitty lets him, nuzzles into his collarbone. His hair tickles Jack’s chin, and Jack rolls his eyes fondly.

“I love you. Even when you suck at talking.”

“Brah, you’re the fucking worst communicator I’ve met in my life,” Shitty says, but his voice sounds thick.

“No. I mean. You don’t always. Tell people when you’re upset.” Jack works out the words, giving up on eloquence to say what he needs. “And that’s. Bad. But I’m always here for you. And you don’t have to talk about it for me to care.”

Shitty braces his elbows on the bed, shifting up to look Jack in the eyes. His eyes are wet and his nose and cheeks are starting to go blotchy. He leans in to kiss Jack, warm and catching. 

Jack grabs him by the biceps, pulls him back, and stares. Shitty doesn’t say anything, lets him look. Goes with it when Jack pulls him back in, deepens the kiss when Jack opens his mouth under him. 

“You good?” Jack asks breathlessly when they separate.

Shitty smiles lopsidedly. “Stop stealing my lines, Zimmermann.”


End file.
